Engaging with GMAT Reading Comprehension Passages

By Katharine Rudzitis

Anyone planning to take the GMAT will sit through a Verbal Reasoning section, which includes questions on lengthy Reading Comprehension passages. These questions involve tasks related to the main idea, structure, inferences, details, tone and so on. The trouble is, these passages are lengthy, and with a seventy-five minute limit for the entire Verbal Reasoning section, time can run out.

Basic Strategy for Reading Comprehension Passages

Using a consistent strategy while reading passage will help test-takers better understand the key points of passages. The overall approach to Reading Comprehension passages and questions is:

• Read the first question
• Read the passage at a comfortable speed
• Engage in the material (but ignore some)
• Summarize each paragraph
• Identify the main idea
• Determine the best answer while eliminating incorrect answer choices

In this article, we’ll spend some time focusing on the third step: engaging in the material.

Feign Interest

It’s crucial that you avoid the “Sunday Newspaper Syndrome,” which refers to a common habit of glancing over reading material without paying much attention, and then realizing that you can’t remember what you’ve read. To avoid this, try to boost your attention by feigning enthusiasm; even if the passage is about a tedious topic, faking interest in that topic can help more information stick.

Visualize

Another strategy is to visualize the information presented in a passage. This can work well for passages with a strong sense of place or lots of descriptive words, and it’ll be easier to recall these images than to remember blocks of text.

Focus on Beginnings and Endings

To help remember crucial information from the passage, pay careful attention to the first and last sentences of each paragraph. These sentences form the intro and conclusion sentences for each paragraph, which can give you a good sense of what the paragraph is all about.

Watch for Transitions

The same strategy applies to transition words, such as although, however, meanwhile, therefore, etc. While intro/conclusion sentences usually introduce and summarize key ideas, transition words signal a shift in the passage, a new argument, the direction of the author’s next thought, or a piece of evidence that might be important when it is time to answer questions.

These transition words fit into different categories, which are divided by the word’s purpose in a paragraph. Below are the main categories of transition words, along with examples of these words:

• Similarity (just like, likewise)
• Expansion (also, additionally)
• Contrast/exception (despite, conversely)
• Emphasis (in fact, particularly)
• Cause and effect (accordingly, hence)
• Conclusion (finally, in summary)

Becoming familiar with these transition words and the information that they signal will help you get a sense of what comes next in a passage. Furthermore, predicting upcoming content is a great way to stay involved in the text, and this prediction technique will help you better understand the structure of a passage.

Watch for Opinion-Laden Words

In addition to transition words, “non-neutral” words can provide clues about the author’s intent or purpose. Any word that carries personal opinion can show what the author thinks about a certain topic. Paying attention to descriptions is a good way to pick up on these words and the author’s tone. Taking note of more extreme modifiers (e.g. “outlandish” vs “strange”) can help show an author’s approach to the issue at hand.

Details: Should You MemorizeThem?

Up until now, these tips have focused on getting the most information possible out of a passage. However, there are also some pieces of passages that you can ignore, and this will save time and allow you to use your time most effectively. It is far more important to have a strong sense of the passage’s main ideas, tone, and general argument than it is to remember every specific detail presented in a passage. This means that you should not spend time memorizing every name, date, technical phrase, or scientific idea from a sentence. It’s more efficient to reread one sentence if there’s a specific question on a detail than to waste time trying to commit that detail to memory.

The only exception to this rule is when a passage is focused strictly on a particular concept. Perhaps there is a passage about a highly technical scientific topic, or a lengthy entry on a historical event. In these cases, recalling the key scientific ideas and the order of events may help you better understand the material. When a particular detail appears in the ever-important introduction/conclusion sentences of a paragraph, it’s worth remembering. 

Resources for Reading Comprehension

You can find examples of these strategies in action in our free GMAT Reading Comprehension videos. Practice problems and tips can be found in the “Engaging in the Passage” video at gmatprepnow.com/module/gmat-reading-comprehension.